The Mugs
by JBWillis
Summary: Far from the wizarding world, lone warriors live to paper the cracks in the Wall between Magic and Muggle. Grubbers, spies, hacks and bent detectives. Witches and wizards tyrannised by authoritarian Muggles struggle for liberty in the Free Wizarding enclaves of Europe and the Americas. Enmity and fear seep through every parting. Fear consumes and power conquers all.
1. Chapter 1

**PART I: AUSLÄNDER**

* * *

** 1977**

* * *

**Die Wand**

March 30th 1977

Ackerstraße, East Berlin

11.25PM CET

"Petrifizieren Totalität!"

Rosa cast the charm with a curved wrist. The young man to which it delivered a freezing jacket of immobility was a _Grenztruppe_, his flashlight and pistol clattering to the floor as he slumped forwards. Wilhelm rushed behind and past Rosa, staring at the rectangular green heap now beside the manhole-ladder.

They had agreed to use nothing but Lumos and anything simple, domestic, pedestrian enough to aid them in their flight. Nothing offensive, nothing in combat. Wilhelm would have blown up at the others - Rosa less so. He thought she must have panicked, gotten frightened when the trooper showed up before them without expectation.

What were they doing in the sewers? Were they searching for us?

"What happened?" Paul Ludwig rushed to the front of the line. There were thirty of them in all; with their bags and charmed objects there should have been enough to fill two floors of a _Ritterbus_ at a slight squeeze. As things were, they were able to pass as carrying but one object each.

As Ludwig stood before her ready to hector on the essentials of secrecy and how her actions had endangered the entire flight, how the communities of the Eastern and Central lands would never join them at this rate if lapses like this kept happening, how she could have brought the entire NVA and the Russians thundering down on top of them, she knew that he was concealing the makings of an orchestral brass section in the space under his trilby hat.

"He saw us... he was raising his torch... he could have called for others..."

"You've thrown the entire mission into danger, we will have to pull out that this rate, I want everyone to observe this was by Rosa's hands, if that Mug dies then the _Zauberer-_ _Gerichtshof _will have us all expatriated and sent into the Amazon deltas, it'll be-"

Wilhelm held his wand up, placing the illumination before Ludwig's lips.

"Enough! Rosa was protecting us. That Mug won't die, he's just seized up for a bit - memory-charm him and he'll think he slipped on the ladder and got a bit stiff in the cold whilst he was passed-out. Just think what she could have done with him - be bloody grateful you're travelling with her and not those Romanian buggers who'd Cruciatus anyone who asked to see a Mug passport."

"This is madness, we could have port-keyed faster than this hoo-hah, we're risking our lives!" A voice from the back of the line could be heard, with muffled agreements from others.

It was Hans Kohl, who whispered with the ghost of a shout. His concurrents were the fellows who had joined him from Saxony, arriving in the city three days before. They were used to the air of pines and rolling hills around them when they performed feats of prowess, trying to surpass their fathers in duels and make notches on the family woodcuts. Before the last great Muggle War, there had been a tavern in Börnersdorf, a little hamlet near Dresden, where the Kohlen and friends of the family would compete for the glory of dueling and brewing champions.

Now, as he had complained as loudly as much as frequently, he smelt not the victorious potion broths of his fathers, but the stench of the occupied city and the foreigners who marched through it on both sides.

But they had heard enough from and of Hans Kohl and his ancestors. The rest of the huddled, tired and anxious women and men crouched in the tunnel that evening wanted to be on the colourful side of the barriers. Most had grown up with Muggle neighbours; they'd had no choice but to blend suitably in; and most had been treated with decency, especially those native to the cities. As division took hold briefly over whether Rosa, the young sorcerer from Leipzig garbed in a brown overcoat and holding a firm and unshaken hand, had correctly dispatched their interrupter, Wilhelm took to the manhole-ladder.

They were at the right juncture.

Wilhelm at once took the lead, Ludwig protesting with a crowing reminder of each man and woman's proper status in the mission.

"We were all agreed, none of this comradely nonsense-talk! Ranks, titles, a solid heirarchy, that's what will get us past here, there's disorder breaking out in the ranks and it's going to get us all killed!"

He began rattling off each name and the decisions taken in the tavern cellars some hundreds of miles away by the main escape committees. Lists of participants had to be scrawled on toilet-paper, stuffed inside socks and stockings before being driven through the Inner Border checkpoints to the right places. The names were quilled up by men unknown to them. Men that not Ludwig, nor Wilhelm, nor Kohl, nor Brandt, nor Hinden, nor Kratz not any of the senior people in the group had met except for Heinrich Parsifal Hoffer, the Posen-Deutsch master sorcerer who'd held the _Wehr_ and the Red Army back from his village in '45 with only his wand and his mind.

He was the great visionary for the escape; not a man of prophecy but a man of great learning, better than any east of the Rhine, so they said. But they had said much - they said that one day the wizards in the West would tear the Wall from its foundations. It was a story that kept the children from crying too much at bed. For want of food, for want of friends, for want of something their parents had not had, nor really their grandparents. Whatever misery came upon the Muggles, they were supposed to hide away from. Magical peoples elsewhere could slip by unnoticed and enjoy prosperity when the Mugs tormented one another with their gods and machines. Yet here, here in what the Mugs called the Fatherland, suffering was shared like unknown bushels from a poisoned orchard.

Wilhelm clambered up the steel handlebars of the ladder. It was too close to boyhood play for him not to imagine him sticking his disorderly auburn hair through a knight's helmet and out above a medieval parapet. But now he could think only of the camps he had been told about in the Muggle school and in muttered discussions among the elders. The school had said that only the brave communists had been put there, murdered for their commitment to the working-class by the reactionaries. The elders had said other things. He had been old enough early on, about the time he had let go of the dada-bear he carried incessantly as an infant, to realise that none were telling him an unvarnished story.

As he poked cranium and cap above the manhole, he allayed the fear by thinking briefly why he was there. Was it to get the education he wanted? Was it for lofty ideas shared around the smoking-table about conscience and the spoken voice? Was it for the women, the music, the jeans, all the things he read in the snatched letters from cousin Rolf? How could he proceed above this manhole without clear sight of what he was proceeding towards? The West. Oh to the West, he was always told, where they have food for the taking and drink for the drinking. And women for -

"Muglights, get down Wilhelm!" Hans Dix, the less intransigent Hans of the group, hissed with fraternal viciousness to him as Wilhelm felt a hand pulling him down from the steel parapet.

Muglights were known to every witch and wizard in East Berlin and beyond its limits far out across Germany and into the Ironland. They spelled death or certain failure for those hoping to make it out beyond the walls and wires which bound them to this grey, cold place. Muglights were one of the few Muggle objects that they genuinely feared, with a trepidation that even Ludwig and the stern Kratz and even a powerful man like Hoffer could succumb to. Some among the Berlin magical volk had come to fear all intense light and heat. It was for the hours they spent in them, unable to move.

"Why couldn't we have bloody transfigured?" Some ignorant man, soon harangued down to more helpful silence by his wife, muttered as Wilhelm descended the ladder with Hans Dix's hand still at his back.

The Muglights could detain you, it was thought, and keep you from moving from a state of freeze - whilst preserving you in uncomfortable heat that rose in intensity. It was like petrification but irreversible (so far, that was - nobody had dared approach any wizard trapped in the lights for long enough to try complex counteracting magic). Superstition about Muglights, as with the Mugs generally in the East, was rife and Rosa had long encouraged Wilhelm to separate fantasy from fact when it came to understanding and predicting them. It was hard to come by reliable means of studying them.

His mother was convinced the Mugs had harnessed some unknown entity of power to control them; all the darkness and evil in the world channeled into these great beams of polarising light and fixated on anyone who tried to make a break for the world beyond what this army of Mugs controlled. He had long believed that before abandoning it as a childish exaggeration. But many persisted in this and related convictions.

The Mugs had with their wicked, impenetrable mechanical sciences developed a form of high-intensity candle which could immobilise any magical person by setting small fires in objects made with properties found in the magical world. The Mugs had stolen petrifying agents during the last muggle War and engineered a means to project them out of torches, thinking stupidly that they were deploying a kind of drying hose. The Mugs had built _Die Wand_ across a site of ancient Dark magic and had no clue what they were actually deploying when training lights on magical folk. All of these ideas and hypotheses and more were swapped around tavern tables and the passageways beneath the Ironland, but most of all in Germany. Each possessed its own charm though never what was demanded of any sufficient explanation. Such was the criterion set by Hoffer, who respected one thing among a few inventions of the Muggle world. Muggle logic, he persisted in telling them, had its uses. And by that logic, he dismantled each proposed reason for the Muglights affecting witches and wizards as they did.

Hoffer had instead proffered the theory that Wilhelm had come to respect the most. According to his inductions from the many reports they had received over years of escape efforts, Hoffer believed that Mugs had used some manner of Dark Magic to build the Muglights without them necessarily knowing it. Someone outside, from the magical world, dark wizards were manipulating the Mugs who controlled _Die Wand_ and playing them like pipe-organs.

This caused first consternation and then horror for all who gave Hoffer the benefit of listening to his theories. None among the group now shivering beneath the manhole cover at this crossing of _Die Wand_ besides Wilhelm had brought themselves to accept any component of the thesis. The Mugs were plainly responsible for the wizards of the Ironlands' current, past and future misery and the Mugs alone. That their homeland was even called the 'Ironland' now was squarely down to the Mugs.

"The very suggestion that any of our people could be in any way responsible for the present state of things is reproachable nonsense, it's a blasphemy, an utter blasphemy to even suggest such a thing!" Ludwig would go on at length, coming close to shaking a fist towards Hoffer before regaining the decorum befitting his hat.

"It is positively wicked to accuse anyone among us of collaborating with them to any such length. What would they gain from it? What benefit could it yield them? Why would they hen us all, including themselves, behind these walls and wires and lights with no means to disapparate! And do explain to me again, Mr. Hoffer, why we cannot but once try to depart via our own methods and not by this Muggle-co-opted donkey work!"

During every one or every other escape committee meeting, Ludwig would spell out his grievances to Hoffer between his demands for Hoffer's silence on his theories. With a slight application of hand to his cheek - there was no beard to tassle with, though Hoffer resembled a man bereft of one - he would lean back and expound once again on why they could not don their robes and Disapparate.

"As you know, Mr. Ludwig, the majority of our group have not been beyond the Muggle-designed Inner Border, not least since their last war, and certainly very few of them have ever been as far afield as France or England or Italy. Those that have so made their last visits many years ago, their memories faded and even the well-kept ones preserve only images of places and buildings long since changed or swept from their foundations."

Ludwig would retort with a pride that almost made him hop sideways, pointing to the cellar or the cupboards where treasured objects of the group were kept.

"We have a Pensieve! There is a Pensieve in the cupboard that anyone here can use, anyone who knows the Alps or the Pyrenees can dunk his or her head inside and we'll have a perfect landing ground!"

"Apart from the flagrant illegality of trans-national Apparition under the Statute of Secrecy, the odds of success are diminished with every passing year and every new acquisition of land by Muggle developers out West."

"But Ricardo insists that he can-!"

Hoffer would tire, and with each time the subject arose he would tire more rapidly, ending with his final coda on the matter of Disapparition from the Ironland.

"Ricardo cannot transport all fifty-four of this community to his uncle's holiday cottage in Catalonia where he spent every summer as a boy, crafting butterfly swans from the parchments of love poems he sent to that local village girl he met in the lake - oh you've told me this one, Paul, I've been spared no detail. He could take at best four or five of us and as soon as he arrives on the ground, the Spanish Wizengamot will make their entrance, of course expected by no-one. If they don't arrest him and the others, they'll certainly stop them coming back for the rest of us. It'd be enough to create an international incident for the Muggles and one they might just make another war out of, now I'm sure none of us here want that on our hands?"

And that would be the end Hoffer and Ludwig's exchange of opinion on the matter. So the committee meetings went in the dining-room of Ludwig's house in the village where it was all cooked up.

"Come on, get us out of this filthy blasted sewer, I want to be in the forests of the Fulda riding my broom again!" Konny Fester piped up from below. He was in his early twenties but held the agitation of a child denied passage down the stairs on Christmas morning.

His education, like Wilhelm's, was incomplete and he lived in the precarious state of an unfinished adolescence. Broom riding had been a rare, exhilarating folly conducted in the utmost obscurity in some woods where it was hoped the Mugs had not sent their soldiers, dogs and listening-devices. One had to go deep within the German interior to find a spot remote enough from the border that you would not run into the regiments of counter-invasion forces and spying apparatus built to withstand the penetration of the American Muggles. That is why he dreamed of flying freely in Fulda, where the Americans would be all around him too focused on invading the Ironland to care about him soaring above them on a brand new broom. Perhaps an English one. Or why not an American one?

Konny, also like Wilhelm, had been forced to go through a Muggle school and was told in regularity of the perennial threat posed by the Yankees and their spy planes, economic sabotage and punk music. The Free German Youth brigades and their insufferable lectures and holidays were filled with warnings about anything American, but the music always stood out. Men and women in leather with spiked, bloodied hair and faces screaming incomprehensible incitements to chaos in well-furnished capitalist recording studios.

Wilhelm couldn't understand what they were saying on the bootleg tapes he listened to with his Muggle friends, and his English was normally good. Ramones, Iggy Pop, the Dolls that came from New York - all of it was the work of the American ruling class. That was what they were incessantly reminded of at school, at camp and right up to their graduations.

The hell with graduation, he had decided. He had heard of a programme for uneducated and fallen-behind wizards in England that was particularly good. Only rumours, but they were better than anything he had heard in the Ironland. Seventeen and ready to study what he should have been learning from the age of eleven. Of course he had been to the little classes that Hoffer, Ludwig and some of the other elders in the village threw together as best they could, teaching the spells they half-remembered from the old textbooks but it was no proper comparison.

No time for bitterness, he reminded himself. Freedom was in sight.

The bickering beneath him continued. Rosa pulled him further back. Her arm upon him was sudden, the most unexpected of any that could have reached forth. A rush had descended his spine at the unforeseen contact. In a moment it was gone and her arm was elsewhere and he stood considering how close they came and dreaming of learning the spells denied to him and making a better wizard at his age than any above him and finally getting to ask-

Some fool from the back lurched forwards, he knew it was one of the purists, he could tell from their dress. They thought the Mugs were worthless in their containment and restrictions. The ones among their group of twenty did at least. Was it? No. Not Kohl.

Hans Kohl had lost the brown over-robes he had donned at the beginning of the escape, which made him look several octanes scruffier and in synchronicity with the rest of the group. But what he had all of a sudden thrown on was something significant even by the standards of the _Kohlen_. Wilhelm and Rosa knew that they despised the Muggles, the "filthy, leeching, vegetable-headed Mugs".

He now appeared to be wearing black overalls, an unintended parody of the uniforms the Muggle authorities had many of the SED members dressed in for Party functions. There were efforts made at grandiosity, some kind of strings or elongations attached to the buckles to recapture Deutsch wizarding dress of old, but it was a pale imitation. Soon he could add great adorning to the robes that he and his brethren had been denied to wear for so long. No more would the Mugs be the masters of them.

"Hans you fool, they'll make you an icicle you petulant twerp!" Rosa shouted after the man whom so recently was a boy who practiced his spells with a forest twig in the phantom place of their forbidden wands.


	2. Chapter 2

**Waiting for Lang**

March 30th 1977

Bernauer Straße, West Berlin

11.30PM CET

YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR would greet anyone postcard-familiar with the region that Taylor wherein had found himself working the night shift once more. But unlike those later adolescent nights wiled away with lagers in the village pub, boorish locals tipping him with coins snatched behind their sheepdogs' ears, this shift came not with tips or hope of double-time. Waiting as he did would burn through a pension pot's worth of cigarettes as he paced between the huts and barriers.

11.31. Lang was never punctual, Taylor should be used to it by now as the rest on the balcony undoubtedly were. He was the person ostensibly running the operation. Lang's famous detentions by idle chatter and promises of a drink from some Party zealot or another which he must oblige, along with Lang's tall retelling of the event ("wouldn't want them to rumble me now, 214, would I?"), that should have long folded into the schedule. But it got under his skin nonetheless. And the woman, Eva, cursed name as she had, might least have tried to beat Lang to the post.

11.34. He thought of television at home. Taylor was, when time permitted, fond of an Irish comic to whom Aunty had given a prime-time slot. There was an attention to sharpness that he somehow conveyed in long stories and seated monologues. A stiff drink to hand and smoke puffed between each prefatory punchline, he could hold an educated BBC studio crowd with the most rambling, winding shaggy-dog tale from the taverns of the old isle. Gags, setups, the slightest genus of things could make for an evening of unseasonal chuckle for Taylor.

He considered what he might be missing this week. He did not like television but the comic reminded him of the theatre, of the Valleys, of home. It was the regional inflections even if not his own. The two drunks, the fishermen, the duck-shooters.

11.38. No sign of the duck.

And he has a little drop of rum to keep warm.

11.45. Still no sign of the duck.

And he has another drop.

11.50. Still no sign of the duck.

He has another drop.

11.55. Nothing. Crosby was stood nearby, fidgeting with his watch. He was a technician by trade and one knew his watch would be in check - his shuffling about was a mark of irritation less well-hidden than Taylor's own. Though the rum was not a matter of protest, he knew that in their still observation over the Wall, the American sentries would be questioning his constitution.

He turned to Crosby. There need only for a directional glance over the Wall and the guard-towers.  
"Dead." He spoke to Crosby alone, hoping the Americans would stay fixated on the usual monotony of the opposing searchlights.

"Might ask the yanks to get Checko Charlie on the blower." Crosby said without stopping his fidgeting right and left.

That was the postcard mistake. Most who had not been to the Free City, he assumed, would not know the difference between the border-crossings. They imagined that ruddy great sign lit up with searchlights, American tanks facing off against the Russians in a precarious balance that teetered between a game of backgammon and a game of chicken. They would see some of that here, but other things besides. The American sentires were there, as they were on every street in this part of the city. Since the war, the ceremonial command of the Allies had remained in effect along with every clothed trapping of 1945, still in a state of post-surrender administration and treaty-obligations.

Everyone was still contractually friends with everyone else. Diplomacy and necessity enforced friendships as parents of quarreling, bullysome children arranged for play-dates on slides and swing-sets. The power-sharing was still in effect. Berlin was still under occupation by the victor states until it could achieve full reconstruction and rehabilitation. As the rows of terraced houses opposite him had been boarded up until 1962 and then demolished to make way for the Wall, he knew that day was kicked into the same grassy highlands as the coming of the Hebrew _Mosiach_ and the Church's promise of the Return of Christ.

_Be thou my vision_. He somewhat missed chapel. Never a strong baritone but always valuable to the choir. Even the Bishop had complimented his consistency.

The Strasse that crossed below saw little traffic and a few audaciously parked automobiles. Most, he anticipated, belonged to foolhardy servicemen in the West German and the American forces; it was not unknown for the men posted here to buy inexpensive German autos with their danger-pay. The requisite civilians in the surrounding buildings owned a few of the Volkswagens parked within reach of the longer searchlights and even the optics of the East German snipers. He often contemplated whether some spotty zealot on the other side, raised by dear Mama to love the SED and the code of the Volkspolizei would actually fire over the border. One similarly fresh or overly testosteroned Yank would squeeze off some return shots without a second thought, and with the clash of young love of country and mother there would come hence the cockroaches.

Lighting up again, he waited for Crosby to finish a secure line conversation with an officer at Charlie. He returned, almost scuffing his shoes with frustrated shuffling, as if they had expected some positive indications from the boys at the main artery.

"Nothing."

"Just keep your eyes wide." Taylor said, pulling out his binoculars from the holster kept on the shoulder opposite his oft-empty pistol.

They became more conspicuous by doing so but he knew the mores of congruity were abandoned by both sides at this range. He could practically see the glint of reflection in the lenses and telescopic sights on the guard towers. Comparably, they on the side of the wall adorned with patches of graffiti and the marks of a free, disorderly society made their entrenchments on the balconies and upper roofs of buildings which eked out a continued existence against the Wall in foreground.

Presently Taylor, Crosby, five American soldiers and their sergeant along with coming-and-going French infantry and the occasional British trooper off-duty stood on the balcony of Satchmo's. It was a bar taking aesthetic heed from a curious Germanic love of Louis Armstrong formed in the immediate years after Hitler had separated his lobes in the bunker.

As part of rules for compliance with the authorities whose sentries became the best patrons, Satchmo's played observation post for part of this section of the solid, squalid, hated and loathed concrete razor across the city's body. Were war to begin, the tank shells would first strike here and the soldiers on night-leave would be blissfully, drunkenly obliterated some good minutes before the world followed in flames.

Taylor always got a good rum in Satchmo's. They mixed some coconut to the right length - his one foray into exoticism beyond an austere, post-Anglican boarding life.

Another drop to keep warm. The cold was setting in hard. It was unseemly low in temperature for late March. Frost had been seen below on previous nights and again this evening. It had spread with rapacity across the Strasse, even creeping up car windows and lampposts, then apparently vanishing by morning.

He briefly thought of Scotland. He thought of the trains. Gratitude could be found in one cycling memory, surfacing whenever the white hairs grew upwards in the German winters. He could express thanks that he was no longer at the mercy of winters in that cursed-

"Contact East, one car, one occupant, heading west, approaching visa check."

One of the Americans startled him from a resting point of the binoculars on some darkened point behind the Wall and the guard towers. He snapped back to the road intersecting the Strasse and the Wall. It was correct, on the eastern side, one vehicle approached. Trabant, white - what else did he expect? Occupant was alone, male. He crouched down to get a better glimpse of the driver.

It was him. Taylor felt a hot rush down his arm as he reached for a handset radio in his jacket, retracted the aerial and spoke in the driest tone of his kind.

"Piano strung."

There was no reply and he liked it. He had come to dread the garbled "say again?" which had bungled the response-times to more than one operation elsewhere in-country. But that was another unit. He was by posting usually a man of Bonn, the occupied city was not his normal brief. He liked Bonn; small and artificial enough for him to think of it as an amusement park. The Yanks would go on and on about their amusement parks, which he hoped to visit just to show them up. Never again would he hear put down the British holiday camp by some buzzcut boy rifleman from Tennessee-

"Mr. Taylor we have contact at two o'clock, scope bear right one click east, unknown contacts coming out of a manhole cover."

Taylor jerked rightward. One of the American sentries was peering through his own binoculars into the land beyond the Wall, to the right of the guard tower nearest in their vision. Betwixt the gaps of the towers, the wire, the Wall and the brutalist structures lining the streets behind it, there was a patch of what appeared to be waste-ground; that or some unused NVA parking space. Taylor tried to recall how the scene appeared in daylight. In the adjoining road were manholes and sewer grates, as in most roads across both sides of the city. Not all of them led to a crossing-point of the Wall.

"Oh Christ this better be hobos, if this is another escape attempt- "

Taylor considered the hobos and bums of the American landscape. Railroad riders with bindles, steam engine capped panhandlers with flap-ended boots. They were the characters he would adore to exit the manholes now - exciting the guards no more than would be enough to detain his man at the border for an hour whilst they swept the area. But he knew that in the East, there were no hobos. Homelessness did not exist, as did unemployment. To have no occupation was to commit a criminal offence. Housing was guaranteed, though he often questioned if the tramps who fumbled through the refuse bins at the Ritz were better off than the proletarians in their triumphal Democratic Republic here.

It would not be tramps, or bums, or hobos, or _les miserables_. He had forseen the possibility though not strictly planned for the outcome and eventuality of it taking place before him. This was another bloody dash for freedom by a foolhardy band of _Michels_ in Tyrolean hats who could make it through the sewers without being spotted yet. Might be racing to join the CDU and speak at the next conference, denouncing the suppression of the churches and the lack of decent taverns in the East.

Sparks. The buggers had sparks.

"Contact mark, light visual two o'clock, possible flares in Soviet sector, over." The American sentry continued his chatter, the servicemen from inside Satchmo's now emerging to gawp at the scene as it developed like film rolls from that holiday one would rather be forgot-

_"Les salauds ont des reflets."_

The first target marking by the American had passed over his head. He did not consider the significance of 'flares'. It was the French officer behind him muttering it to his companions that set off the reaction.

Taylor began his prayer that it would not be that.

"Could it be torches- flashlights?"

"No Mr. Taylor, they're scattering an airburst, it's flares, not seen those before, might be home made. We'll alert command, somebody get the Colonel down here! Get on to Charlie!" The sentry yelled to his squad. Crosby stared on, apprehending that Taylor might be apprehending something rash.

Flares he knew of. He'd seen plenty with the Aussies, most of them friendly, many not. Fireworks were what the V-Cs preferred to use for frighteners. Charlie. Why did that damned sentry have to yell 'Charlie' at this moment of alarm? The heat was returning to him on this cold late spring night. Red sand, dense bush, the thudding of the mosquitoes and insects in every crevice. Streyans front and back, Americans off in the flanks and young boys in black pajamas leading them into a trap.

He was becoming one of them. Too much like the Yanks. He knew there were millions of them who had returned from Southeast Asia with their minds scrambled - the Aussies too, he presumed. This was where decorum was meant to take precedence. Face forward, face upward and fix on the horizon. England expects. And England expected him now to take the binoculars beside him and keep curtains closed for decency's sake.

"Command, this is Delta 4-1, unidentified activity in the Eastern sector at Bernauer Straße Checkpoint Delta, looks like an escape party, request evac teams and all points alert, over."

Taylor reached into the sentry's arms, prized the binoculars from his right wrist and peered over the Wall and its attendant towers. Crackling on the radio was followed with a quick response.

"Ah, roger, Command receiving, establish perimeter and await orders. Police are being notified. Advise Eastern alertness over."

Taylor gazed over the shadows of the Wall. A periodic rotation of the searchlights passed over the rear between meeting at the crossing-point. For a glib second or half-second, he spotted a figure darting from the site of a manhole-cover to a small barrier about ten feet from the Wall.

He refocused his gaze. There were spots of light coming up from the manhole and the pavement surrounding it. They could have been torches, they were distinct from the flares which got the sentry's attention. They were almost pinpricks, ignored by the guards on the Wall. They had probably seen the upsurge in chatter and activity on the Satchmo side and turned their attention to whatever their adversaries in the Allied sectors were doing.

"Command to Delta 1-1, put your squads on alert, civil police are en route ETA thirty seconds, brace for civilian crossers from the Eastern Zone. Cover all points, prepare for enemy fire, over."

Alarms began to sound at the Wall. Taylor wished the Communists would invent something different to blast out as a general alert. It was still the painful whine of the air raids. As if he needed any more joys of youth wrought on him at this moment.

The American officer in command of the boys now hurtling out of Satchmo's with rifles and more binoculars responded to his orders as Taylor peered onwards. The sentry from whom he had borrowed the binoculars looked almost sideways at him, whilst Crosby approached in a blue vogue with looks of knowing.

"Taylor. It's just some poxy civilians. It isn't Ivan."

Crosby made no impact on his gaze. He could see flashes emerging from the manhole. Sparks appeared again, closer and closer to the Wall. One light in particular caught his eye, a persistent flash kept in motion that ran straight from the opening of the manhole, above the figure carrying it, to the Wall.

Lumos.

A second passed. It was a full second this time.

Taylor grabbed a rifle from the sentry next to him and peered through the scope. The lens was strong enough to keep the pricks and dots of light reflecting in his eyes. He could see flashes of colour. The brainless buggers were using red sparks.

No room to move. Snap to target, snap back and out again. He knew they would panic, see the searchlights as the shots pockmarked the ground and retaliate against the Wall. That would send them back down within a few moments.

The muzzle flashed and the sentries beside him ducked; he was responding to fire - post-hoc it would be his defence, his line, his resolute marker of defiance. Three shots fired towards the Wall in self-defence at some upstart on the guard-tower who had decided to take a crack at the distinctly non-uniformed figure standing on the balcony of Satchmo's directly opposite them.

By the second, he created this new reality. Thinking quickly had been with him since school. Every school he attended. React fast but with consideration, make time to think but no room for them to move. Always have an escape-route. Something to tell the Headmaster in his study when it all came out in the wash.

"Taylor!"

The shots did their terrible work. He heard yelping from the great gulf between them and the blackness behind the Wall. By the time the guards on the tower had moved to return fire, the searchlights spinning round to face Bernauer, earth-shaking disruption had begun behind them.

Dashes of colour and lights gushed from behind the Wall. He saw fire strike the ground near the first row of wire; white streaks rushed out to strike the guard-tower and he even saw a dash of brilliant green light fly towards the East German sentries now shooting into their own sector.

An arm grabbed him as he had grabbed the binoculars and then the rifle. It was Crosby. He felt like he was being grabbed by an airman aboard a descending flight.

Across Bernauer and atop the Wall, from the flashes beneath and the din of the sirens in all ears, one NVA man spun around to face the opposing side once more. He reached a true conclusion from erroneous steps of logic. Namely panic. His comrades firing into the display of wraithlike projectiles being directed at the Wall and themselves, this guard thought that shots had reverberated from the Western side. In that moment, he was convinced the Yankees were shooting at him - he, Comrade-Private Herman, was to be their first claimed scalp in the imperialist assault on the Democratic Republic.

He spotted what looked like an officer; there were two of them in dark overcoats, not military uniforms. They might be capitalists, businessmen from New York or Manchester to oversee the seizure of the Peoples' land in person. If he was to be killed by American snipers, he would bring them down first and perhaps get the Hero Award.

He aimed his carbine directly towards the non-uniformed men. One seemed to be dragging the other off towards the side; they had spotted him! He would act quickly, squeeze off a few shots and defend the Republic before the Yankees got him.

Taylor tried to tussle against Crosby and hand the rifle back to the sentry from whom he had grabbed it. Blinding pain struck him in the ribs as shots echoed from the Wall. He did not see the flash of the barrel for the array of lights now dancing behind the wall.

He fell sideways as Crosby held him up. Flecks of the balcony struck his ankles as shots fragmented around him. The Americans fresh out of Satchmo's were eager to shoot back, Command screaming at them over the radio channels to hold fire as the light-show behind the Wall seemed to fade from his horizon.

Crosby was now carrying him by his upper arms and body as two police officers held up his legs. He felt treacle run down his arms. He worried that it would stain and ruin the advancing number of green tunics he saw around him beneath anxious Prussian yelling.

Treacle. They would be so furious. When he stained his outdoor clothes with it at the picnic, she had been spitting with rage. Rationing still on, wanton carelessness, supposed to last until winter, no boy under my roof-

By some means he could hear his thoughts. He wondered if they had struck him with one of their mind-warping efforts. They loved their psychological torture, how he had ground his teeth remembering it over the years.

"Bloody fools. Sabotaging... ruining... crashing into it like blind elephants... my... bloody operation."

German policemen shouting for vehicles. He was in a war film. He had escaped from Stalag Luft Something and was trying to get to Switzerland. He must break free of this. Wounded but not done for yet. He wanted to kick but he knew Crosby would report it to Control and the chiefs and he would be forced out for insubordination.

The Germans were still wearing green for some reason. Not natural. They belonged in grey. The Communists had got that part right at the very least.

Down the stairs within Satchmo's and out through the terrace, Crosby just tripping with poise over dining chairs and tables in the French style as they entered the street at the juncture of Bernauer. Scores of West Berlin officers rushed down either sidewalk, the road itself now being clogged up with American jeeps and the first mechanised line of defence against Moscow. Thousands of men and boys too young for Vietnam were now about to face whatever the Soviets and the East Germans planned to throw in retaliation for Taylor having just pelted a compass at them in Geography class.

"Bastards... horror show... freak circus... kill them all! Kill them all and let us get on with our bloody work!"

As they pushed him into a police van which became his ambulance and potentially his grave-clothes, he was still exclaiming and cursing the ignoramuses and political solipsists who had, by his estimates, spent a few paltry weeks planning a permanent vacation from the Eastern Bloc by blundering right through a border crossing and NATO checkpoint, bungling and trampling muddied hobnail boots over an intelligence-growing operation that had been planted and cultivated over the previous eight months.

They would have him out of Berlin for this - out of Bonn, nonetheless. Never would they trust him with a foreign capital after pulling such a stunt. And how little explanation he could give. To give all for God, Queen and Country; he'd probably end up working in some poxy boarding school. Take Crosby with him and have him teach them Classics, the girls or self-conscious boys gushing over his pointed smile and blonde over-comb so Mr. Taylor, sir, can write the sermons for morning chapel and deliver dour lecture on the virtue of meekness and self-restraint.

What on earth could he wear to his first meeting with the Headmaster at whatever miserable place they would send him to? The red treacle really began now to stain his tie and shirt; the suit was far from Saville Row but it was one of the few cut for him, that he may make a good impression on Berlin Station. They weren't going to see a Bonn man looking like a tin salesman.

He began to laugh. The van turned in the street as alarms began to sound both sides of the Wall. These silly alerts happened every once in a blue moon, but now the moon would turn to blood. Colour sank from the walls of the van as he thought of the perfect outfit to wear when he spoke to the hiring board of whatever minor public school might be willing to take on a disgraced man of the Intelligence Service. Perhaps he could teach them English. Not much cop at Maths. Then again, maybe History. Stand at the front of the classroom and hanker on the chalkboard for the days of Empire. Pop over to French and get the most able pupils to tell stories of visits to _Departments_ and Francophone colonies that no longer existed. Tell them lies about Vietnam.

He knew what he could wear. He had never burned it, though he'd bought the kerosene and put himself to great expense at a time when Suez had made it all but impossible to get. Stood in the field, clutching the robes, willing himself to pull out the lighter and set them to the flames. Perhaps he thought them cursed, somehow impossible to destroy. Yet he could not bring his hands to bear full obliteration of the greatest evidence he had that such a place existed.

Go up, go up, go up to Westminster, he thought. Or Paul's. Or Harrow. Why not skip down to the Other Place singing the damned Boating Song? They would gaze at him in those gowns and stand agape with the tales of school he could tell.

Taylor spluttered as he laughed. The treacle had got through to his throat, he knew it would be through the lungs.

He would come up to teach in his old Slytherin robes.


	3. Chapter 3

**Call-out**

April 2nd 1977

Stapleton, North Yorkshire, England

01.30AM GMT

In some benighted campus bedroom or boiler room or broom cupboard within crackling AM range, a pirate captained his vessel.

"You are listening to The York Minstrels, this one goes out to all the bobbies on the beat tonight interested in taking our jolly ship from the waves. May you be met face to face by one Three Dog Night."

_"How can people be so heartless..._

_How can people be so cruel..."_

The brow of the hill gave the officers a clear overview of whatever sordidness lay below them. Little much, they were several miles from any big town or city and the pirate crew was well beyond their reach for the night. It was a priority on the station noticeboard to find the broadcasting location and bring in the DJs for incitement to this, that and the other. Occasionally they gave airtime to radicals, bomb-throwers and other assorted beatniks living off recreational herbs and Arts Council grants.

Tonight, they had been posted here. Far from wherever in York or Leeds this fellow was taunting them with some transmitters and American hippie-rock from the last hand-wringing decade.

"I miss the Anglias." Fisher was compelled to raise some suitable discussion, even if bleak in its mourning for the old ways of things, to drown out the trash they had to monitor with futility.

"Yeah well I miss the south coast, used to always go there for our 'olidays." Anderson chipped in between the mint he had unwrapped, hoping to steer his sergeant from the indulgence of reminiscence.

It was not that Fisher's memories were unfailingly dull and tangentially related to tedious anecdotes about policing the villages and market towns in an age of gentility and decency, when so and so knew what was what. They were that of course, but that was not the cause of his distraction. It was the predictable manner in which he delivered them. Something would set him off; seeing an old bus would normally do it, before he went on about his years with the buses and get to the policing, but the moral and cultural shortcomings of the younger generations would do it all the better.

"Or the Zephyrs, solid cars they were, you had presence when you went up to some troublesome house in one of them."

"Oh I don't wanna hear it, we're supposed to be out catching speeding motorists, menaces to society, and all you can do is moan about the old heaps you used to do your Miss Marple rounds in back before the blacks and Pakis and Mods and Rockers came along and made the job ungentlemanly."

"Don't you get any ideas about the job, you've got a lot to take in yet. Don't think I don't know the sort, me own daughter's seeing one just like you now, you know who I mean."

"How could I forget, chappie thinks he's going to be the next David Bowie because he's bought an electric ukulele down the York market vaults. Really wrong-footed citizen, a layabout, a disgrace to his namesakes and an outstanding example of where this country's gone wrong in the tutelage of its young."

Anderson had attained a level of education higher than his superior; he left school at fifteen, not fourteen and had tried preparatory courses for copywriting before the necessity of home economics sent him to Hendon. The Anderson family had returned, for reasons he never understood, to its ancestral home in Harrogate and hence he had found himself at thirty and wearing the uniform of the county constabulary.

Fisher grunted as the radio droned on with no further hint of where the pirates were sending out their wicked words from.

_"'Specially people who care about strangers,  
Who care about evil and social injustice_

_Do you only care about the being proud_

_How about a needed friend."_

"Blithering nonsense this is, rather be listening to the Slav propaganda."

"Didn't know you liked Radio Moscow." Anderson tried to push his sarcasm with his near-superior, knowing Fisher's virulent distaste at the mere suggestion that anything in his life was Red. He knew that a neighbour had suggested replacing his personal car, an old Consul on its last legs, with a Lada fresh off the boat from Kaliningrad. Fisher had wanted to book him there and then as an enemy subversive under the Defence of the Realm Act, but knew that the station CID wouldn't be keen on him after that.

"Sodding Russians polluting the airwaves talking absolute shite, going on about their next big space mission, how they're gonna make the Yank moon landings look like a childrens' picnic, then they're off blaming us for that last bit of bother in Berlin, then music. I'll give the Russians that, they can write a good song with a good band. Bloody disgrace when the Reds can pipe out a more inspiring tune than the rubbish they've got the young'uns putting out these-"

_"XN, XN to all units, we've got a motorcycle travelling at high speed on the Darlington Road north, he's run several lights and junctions, XN over."_

The new control room at Newby Wiske Hall had intervened with righteousness. Anderson grabbed his chance, thanking the divine wisdom of the switchboards for this deliverance from Fisher's moans by the anonymous joy-riders, grabbing the receiver.

"November Four, November Four receiving XN, we're in response range from Stapleton village, can we get a description on the bike over?"

_"Received November Four, last position was one mile south of Stapleton, should be coming your way now. Bike is a Triumph Tiger, one male rider one male passenger both late teens. Speed is in excess of eighty, approach with caution, XN over."_

Fisher had the engine running before Anderson had the receiver down. This would be an opportune moment to instill some retributive justice on the younger types whom he knew with gut knowledge would be listening to the pirates every night.

Within minutes of departure from their waiting spot, the rolling hills and fields between them and the towns blurred past as Fisher moved the speed up to a steady pace of seventy. They were to wait for the bike to pass them by before lighting up the blues. In the dark, the patrol car was easy to overlook and Fisher expected the riders to be not the brightest sparks in the toolbox of young tearaways.

"He's coming up on the inside, hasn't seen us, give him some room." Anderson peered into the mirror to see the fast-approaching bike. There was something devilish in the eyes of the rider, the rest of his face obscured but for the flittering strands of long, wild hair.

"No helmets I'll bet!" Fisher

"Nothing on either by the looks of it. Christ they're going, they're going, they're on the right, lights and wailer on," Anderson flipped the switches for roof lights and sirens, "here we go sarge."

The bike sailed past them with ease, the riders unfazed by the apparition of blue light bounding off the road surface and their own bodies. Fisher pressed down to maintain the pace, realising the bike would be out of reach within mere seconds otherwise.

"XN, XN this is November Four, we're on the motorbike now, doing eighty miles an hour on the Darlington Road north, going to need assistance with this one he's really going."

Anderson waited for a response as the chase continued. Fisher wanted the collar but knew it would require more than one panda car to bring the riders in. They should both already be doing sentences and he bet at least one of them would be out on probation.

_"XN receives, will advise over."_

"We'll need the Northumberland boys for this one, he won't be stopping in Darlington." Fisher told Anderson whilst keeping his eyes trained on the rear rider, who seemed to be relishing the chase with an occasional glance behind, a gleeful smile across his mouth.

"XN XN, November Four requesting assistance from Durham Constabulary and Northumbria, suspects could be going any direction and we're on our own up here, November Four over."

The motorcycle and its pursuers neared the limits of the town, pushing a good hundred miles an hour. Fisher considered whether the riders knew the area and the catastrophe they were setting for themselves.

"Bloody fools, should both be in national service."

"Oh don't start on that one again."

As Anderson tried to deflate Fisher's attempt at social commentary in the midst of high-speed pursuit, he grew frustrated with the lack of response from the control room.

"XN XN this is November Four, we're now in County Durham entering Darlington, suspects likely headed towards the town center, please advise on pursuit over."

They began to round corners, the speeds dropping only for moments of necessity. Fisher felt his heart racing to uncomfortable speeds. He had not been on one of these pursuits for some time, and each time previously it had become a multiple-force operation. Blaggers and raiders tearing through Sheffield and over the Pennines. Escaped prisoners. One chase across the Dales got swept up in the administrative picnic blanket that the superintendent always referred to as "a London matter". Fisher was convinced had something to do with the Russians and the golf balls at Fylingdales.

The bike rounded further corners as XN remained unhelpfully silent. The panda car kept speed as the dark streets became narrower. Did the riders know the area? Was this to be some goose chase into hostile neighbourhoods? Darlo in its nefarious backstreets was a rough place, had been for years, and Fisher didn't like it any more than his resentful southern colleague.

"He's gonna hit something, can we stop this thing in time if he careens off?" Anderson asked as the bike entered a street leading towards streets of shopping promenades.

"We need assistance from County to end this, he's wild, call up control get some Durham ambulances on standby." Fisher replied.

"Still getting nothing, XN XN this is November Four requesting assistance on Victoria Road heading towards Darlington Station, suspects driving is extremely reckless we've got a likely collision coming up, November Four over!"

The radio was silent but for a slight static hiss.

"For Chrissakes," Anderson switched channels, "any units Darlington area, this is North Yorks Police November Four, high speed pursuit with suspects on motorbike and need assistance, over."

"Whoah!" Both officers were drawn to shout as the bike took an unexpected swerve in the direction leading away from the centre. Fisher slammed the brakes down with his full weight, hoping to avoid crushing the bike and riders under-wheel.

The riders seemed to be possessed of monstrous bravado or a willing death-wish. Regardless, they proceeded up a narrow side-street, one that Anderson could predict the outcome of with ease despite being alien to the area.

"We've got 'em now! That's a dead end!"

Anderson's jolt of excitement was met with the physical jerks of the car as Fisher swung round into the alleyway after the bike. The panda car he loathed suddenly lost rolls of paint along the left-hand flank as they struggled to make it through the gap.

Within seconds, their pursuit had ceased and the danger apparently passed. Anderson felt a fool for having called for assistance. The headlights and the flashing blues shone upon two young punks, probably fresh dropped out of school and riding a bike they had nicked from an unlocked shed. He dispelled the brief flitters of doubt about the speeds they were doing; did they get up to one-fifty at one point on the main road into town? Arrogant, in-over-their-heads teenagers who would now get a clip round the ear from Fisher before being hauled back over the border to Yorkshire where they could be in front of the magistrates by next week.

"Get off the bike!" Fisher yelled to the young lads as he became impaled on the wing-mirror of the panda car. He would have to account for the damage later, but it would be simple enough for the write-up of the incident to place the blame firmly on the toerags who sat mere feet away from him atop their stolen Triumph.

Both of them were a sight to behold, a living legacy of the nonsense that passed for culture in the last decade. He briefly thought that the chap at the front of the bike might be, or at least be associated with, the good-for-nothing that his beloved Elizabeth had taken to seeing instead of that nice chap from school. This lad might be a mate of his or mix in the same circles - he was wearing a great stupid t-shirt with the logo of some awful punk rock group on it. All that was missing was a matted leather jacket and he'd look the full picture.

The two lads were smirking, grinning at the two officers who had risked life, limb and public safety to bring them to a stop. Fisher began his arrest spiel before he could properly run through the pleasantries of asserting authority.

"No helmets! Exceeding the speed limit - by a considerable amount! Failing to stop for police!"

The boy in glasses answered, his mate at the front widening an unyielding smirk.

"We'd have loved to stop for a chat! Only we were trying-"

Anderson interrupted, pulling out a notebook to scrawl the names of the suspects down before they could start pleading to be tried as juveniles.

"Don't get smart! You're in a heap of trouble! Names!"

The driver piped up properly for the first time without losing the smirk.

"Names? Er - well, let's see. There's Wilberforce… Bathsheba… Elvendork…"

His friend, a very dark-haired lad with specs and a more swotty appearance was almost giggling as he finished off the time-wasting backchat of the other lad.

"And what's nice about that one is, you can use it for a boy or a girl."

Anderson felt spit gurgling in his mouth as he began to reach for his truncheon. The rider at the front saved their skins just in time.

"Oh, OUR names, did you mean? You should have said! This here is James Potter, and I'm Sirius Black."

"They'll be seriously black in a minute, you cheeky little-"

Anderson felt the ear-clipping spirit of his fathers returning to his limbs, wanting to take the privilege from Fisher and deliver some corrective blows to both of the boys, the driver in particular.

The boys suddenly appeared to lose focus. Their eyes left the stare of Fisher and Anderson and stared behind the police car, towards the darkness from whence they had driven. Fisher was bemused, then wise to the best explanation. These lads were drugged up, barely able to keep focus. Speeded out of their eyeballs. That was it, he would show them no mercy bringing them in.

From their pockets, the two lads retracted what Fisher thought with Anderson at first to be weapons. Pocket-knives? Firearms? Anderson thought he might have just escaped death in a fatal crash only to be gunned down in an alleyway like a Chicago hoodlum in a Cagney movie. Who were these boys?

Now it got stranger. They were not holding pistols, but pieces of wood. Figures. Fisher thought they must be members or followers of some society-wrecking punk band and it would be only apt for them to be carrying drumsticks. Anderson chimed in first.

"Drumsticks? Right pair of jokers, aren't you? Right, we're arresting you on charges of-"

The boys had left their attention paid to the officers default as they pointed the drumsticks towards the police car. Both shouting in an unintelligible pig-Latin, a flash of light appeared before the officers and Fisher briefly thought he was to be the victim of a bludgeoning by a torch.

Both officers darted around to see where the boys were pointing their drumsticks. It took them both in the jugular. Three figures, hooded and robed, were flying towards them on what appeared to be broomsticks. No motors, no blades and nothing to suggest powered flight. A trio of men flying brooms like it were Halloween and the laws of physics had been suspended for the night by act of God.

They had to have been. The police car was arching backwards on its rear axles, lifted in the air by divine ascendance.

Fisher felt himself collapsing under the weight of the shock. Anderson tried to get closer to the car and a better look in the jagged darkness and tripped over his sergeant with a tremor of panic. The three figures atop the brooms met the police car, now upturned at a right-angle at full speed and crashed to the ground in a flurry of wood splinters and twigs.

Fisher craned around to look at the source of this unimagined carnage. The two lads were firmly once more atop the bike, mounted like a stallion after a jousting skirmish. The long-haired lad at the front winked at Fisher as he revved the engine impetuously.

"Thanks very much! We owe you one!"

Anderson turned to gaze at them, considering whether he should check himself into a hospital when the shift ended. This was clearly something from the coffee at dinner, or the gravy, or a knock on the head. The second boy started speaking from the back of the bike, which appeared to be following the panda car's path skywards.

"Yeah. Nice meeting you! And don't forget: Elvendork! It's unisex!"

Behind the officers, their car flumped to the ground, the suspension crunching under the weight of its drop from a levitation of several feet in the air, the human costs of its obstructive force lying in crumpled agony on the concrete around it.

The bike ascended skywards, almost predictably. Of course. What else was it to do? The two youths driving it had apparently managed to suspend the laws of motion and gravity in order to drive faster than would be permitted in a rally car along public roads without crashing; they had warped the very fabric of reality to make a stationary police car lift unaided into the air, blocking the path of three men on broomsticks who were likewise unimpeded by anything that Newtonian mechanics should have afforded.

Anderson and Fisher realised they were embracing. They might have been siblings frightened by a phantom in a public park. Both were constructing hypotheses to explain the events. A simultaneous auditory and visual delusion induced by unseasonal humidity was Fisher's guess, though he would phrase it verbally as "both gone mad with the heat", though there was little out of the ordinary about the weather.

As both officers shuffled back towards the car, which seemed to have been dropped into an easier position for getting in via the doors, Anderson continued his gravy hypothesis. Something in the canteen, something in the soup dish or the coffee cup had upset their stomachs. The crumpled underside of the car had been caused during the pursuit, hitting a bad pothole or something serious enough to jolt them both out of their seats and deliver concussions which would only exacerbate an existing disorder of the stomach.

They sat in the front seats, exchanging nothing but chattered teeth. For about half a minute they were still, the serenity tempered when Anderson realised that the broomsticks had carried men before shattering. His ears were ringing and noticed it only as he turned around to look through the back window of the car. None of the men who had been debroomed were there; looking through the windows, the officers saw nothing but large splinters and twigs.

No witnesses. One write-off of a panda car and two vanished suspects. Two officers with disorders of mind and body so profound as to warrant compulsory retirement.

"XN XN this is November Four, over."

Anderson spoke into the receiver, hearing nothing. Not even static. He might have been speaking into a plastic toy radio played with by children. He wondered if they would let him have children after this.

"XN XN, urgent assistance, over."

Silence.

"Mark." Fisher was wise before Anderson.

"Any units Darlington area, this is November Four of North Yorks Police requesting urgent assistance, RTA, RTA, we've lost contact with suspects over."

"Mark."

The windscreen was covered first by a dense fog. Fisher had felt his blood begin to chill before Anderson, whose preoccupation with physical disorders had led him to ignore his senses - he could not trust them and did not notice first when the temperature began to drop rapidly.

Shadows enveloped the alleyway. The blue light rotating across the walls from the flashing lamp was obscured. The headlights of the car seemed to fade as a dying gas-lamp.

The radio sprang to life. Not the receiver and the control room remained out of reach. But in those few seconds, they could hear the pirates speaking to them once more.

"And now a request we've had from one of our listeners up north, way north in fact, this goes out to Mr. Drawbridge in bonnie Scotland. One of the big hits of last year, this is Blue Öyster Cult with _Don't Fear the Reaper_. Go and do likewise."

The wall ahead of them seemed to morph into the intangible. It was an illusion; nothing was happening to the bricks ahead but to Fisher and Anderson, the sensory world around them had begun to collapse into an ice age.

Darkness was cast over the remaining light and colour in the alley.

Anderson could see only his breath before his face. Fisher saw even less than his companion and felt his throat begin to stiffen. But then he saw reflections in the driver's mirror.

Anderson pressed his hands to the windscreen and rubbed intensely, trying to prize open a gap in the freezing sheet which had encapsulated the car and see what lay ahead. He was convinced in the senses he no longer trusted that something stood before them. A figure. Several figures. Something.

"Mark! Front and back of us! Look!"

Before them the two men saw first a red flash.

"ARMED ASSISTANCE! ARMED ASSISTANCE REQUIRED! AMBUSH DARLINGTON CENTRAL! XN HAS FU-"

In a cascade of terrible green light, the alley was silenced once again.


	4. Chapter 4

**On the retreat from Austerlitz**

April 2nd 1977

Börnersdorf, Saxony, German Democratic Republic

02.30AM CET

Wilhelm staggered into the kitchen, his feet close to crumbling under the weight of the previous three days. Blood had long scabbed over his ankles and he felt, rightly or not, that the skin was beginning to grow over the tattered fabric that was between his boots and leg-bones.

He had not permitted himself to mourn for Konny. Getting back to this house was the only priority, back to the castle wherein all plans could be made in relative safety. Hoffer had the place protected with various charms - it would never be enough to extricate them from the Muggle world completely; he knew the State would find anyone who went missing from school and make it impossible for them to re-appear in Muggle places without being arrested. But for a few nights a week, this house was home to the magical folk of Börnersdorf and Outer Dresden. They preferred to come here than anywhere else in the region.

Wilhelm took a few breaths. It felt like the first since they had left the sewers in Berlin. He could not help but relive it every few minutes. Hans Kohl making his mad dash for glory and the liberty of Free Wizard towns in the West where the _Butterbier_ ran plentifully and a man could duel in the morning, ride brooms in the afternoon and feast in the evening with a beautiful and well-mannered witch at his side. Such silly romanticism had entranced so many young boys and older fellows who ought to have known better to go charging into the Wall like moths to a flame.

Rosa. He knew Rosa would be back. She would never throw caution to the wind as Hans Kohl did and he knew that Konny had been prone to also. Rosa would plan ahead better than anybody short of Hoffer himself. The old master, a better son of the Prussian wizarding tradition than any of the fools who dressed up in nightgowns and floppy hats trying to emulate the eighteenth-century garb of their ancestors before rushing the Border.

"We're fools. Hopeless, cursed fools!"

He thumped the wooden table in Hoffer's kitchen. It was a genuine artifact, something Wilhelm was convinced predated the Muggle discovery of electricity. He could not remember of Hoffer had bewitched it at some point but it was the bedrock of his philosophy. Better discussions were had at that table than anywhere else, even if they amounted to little else. From every time of crisis and panic over the decades he had lived, Hoffer always championed the table as the best point of recourse.

Perhaps he should not blame the table for what happened to them at the Wall.

Where was Hoffer? No doubt many among their party would seek to blame him. Not enough planning, not sufficiently daring, should have used more magic, should have been better-armed, ad infinitum until it would be accepted that nothing could have been done beyond restraining Hans Kohl and the other hotheads.

First back was Tommy Strauss, one of Paul Ludwig's companions. He had been an apprentice in a workshop for most of his youth, a terrible waste of his arithmetic. Tommy was a wizarding purist like his father and had no ambition to rise into the desk-jockey ranks of the State's administrative offices. So Tommy wiled away in a gloriously proletarian profession, taking a secret and haphazard wizarding education from the elder Strauss, Ludwig, Mrs. Dengler and the small community that gathered in Hoffer's house or in the cellar which Ludwig had prevented the Stasi from discovering through some combination of protection charms and obliviations.

"Do you know where the old fool is? Him and his damned Black Forest Horse hair and his useless planning and his Mug-loving garbage about hexing only in self-defence!"

Tommy was raging to the point of his mouth beginning to foam even sooner than Wilhelm had predicted. The boy had a temper but with every failed attempt to get people to the West he grew more emphatically frustrated. Ludwig could not be held responsible for this in particular. Paul Ludwig was the griping, badgering type who spoke of propriety and delivery - if he were a Muggle, he really would make an excellent SED functionary.

"I know nothing. It's the middle of the night, he'll probably be in bed like the rest of the world."

"Except for the Stasi, they're the Mug bastards who never sleep!" Tommy said, nodding his head in the direction of the kitchen windows.

"What does the Stasi have to do with this? They didn't send Hans charging at the Wall like a mad Viking!" Wilhelm was incredulous, and more so when others began to appear at Tommy's side.

"But they've got their hands on at least four of us now! And that Hoffer isn't one of them!" In walked Dieter, one of the party who had been meant to follow Ludwig.

"I tell you all one thing, I'm not listening to that dribbling philosopher's wisdom another time after this damned mess. Him and his blasphemies about the Muglights will get us all killed!" Tommy said, Dieter and now Peter Kohl, the brother of the fool who charged the Wall, now forming a circle at one end of the table, its owner still absent.

"What blasphemies, what's he said about the Muglights to you that he hasn't told the rest of us?" Ludwig asked in anger and angst; he was sure that Hoffer would have disclosed any new idea he was working on to the whole group.

"Haven't you heard? Did he not keep you all informed properly before we left for Berlin? He thinks the Muglights aren't even being controlled by the Mugs! He thinks our people, fellows of wizarding blood!" Tommy said, spitting as the matter of blood came to the brim, "He thinks it's us! He thinks wizards of our own kind have put those lights there to trap us in place. Under Muggle rule! It's outrage, it's treason for him to even be thinking like that over his broths and saucepans and spooning it into our children's minds!"

Wilhelm knew that Tommy did not have children, nor did Dieter or Peter or the late Hans Kohl. They spoke of the family that the Muggles had deprived them of having. Everyone knew that the Prussian wizards were always from big families, the men siring a hearty offspring for the wars and later for the mercantile trades. This inheritance, the promise of giving an inheritance to ones' descendants, had been cut from their horizons by the surroundings.

Some of the families began to stream in. The wives of the organisers, those who had endured the late-night arguments over this table of Hoffer's, who had cared for the group in its moments of ill-health on the journey, shuffled past the men confronting Wilhelm and towards the saucepans. They had lesser magical talents, or Wilhelm knew them to be less sharpened - the prevailing orthodoxy had been that the education of future wizarding fathers and husbands was the priority, and whatever limited pools of knowledge and supplies could be mustered taught groups of predominantly boys.

Wilhelm and Konny had been among those little classes which met wherever and whenever the space and time could afford.

Rosa. Wilhelm contemplated when he had last seen her. She had not joined the mad rush to scale the wall, he knew that. Was she one of them sending up sparks to draw the Muglights away? Did she buy Hoffer's ideas about their operation?

But time for contemplation ceased as in strode Paul Ludwig. His propriety flowed from a set of ceremonial robes, which he must have gone to his house first to adopt before coming to join the rest of the party at Hoffer's home.

"Well that settles it. I think we've seen enough of the soft thinking that Heinrich Parsifal Hoffer loves to indulge us all in! We've had its results and suffered them all before but none more so than now!"

His followers began to encircle the space around him. Wilhelm was struggling to hold his legs in place after the preceding hours of blinkered escapology and flight from sight. He was wandless, deprived of sleep and probably losing at least a few of his vitals. But he could see through Ludwig as through transparent paper.

"There will be no more discussions of the matter as Hoffer insisted on dragging them out. What happened on the Wall proves what we have known in our hearts for thirty years! The Mugs cannot be trusted, cannot be tolerated, and we will pay for it with our own blood if we entertain delusions contrary to the most basic principles of our forefathers. Magic in _Primo_, Magic in _Omnibus_, Magic in _Supremus_!"

Ludwig continued his spiel. Wilhelm knew what would be following. He had the floor, and no Hoffer to stand against the fantasies that this prim and proper man of lost station would now espouse.

He felt the crowd begin to surge inside the house. He began to recognise people who had not been in the escape party now beginning to swarm around Ludwig and his inner circle. It was never like this before. As long as Hoffer was around, some of the weaker ones in the village would not have fallen for this even weaker rhetoric by Ludwig.

He knew Ludwig was no leader. What was he to do? Command some great act of defiance against the Muggles? No. Right now, he began talking in the ears of the men he trusted most. Delegation of ideas and of responsibility. They would never want Ludwig to make the move all on his own. It was something that Tommy, Dieter and Peter and Hans and so many of the others had thought the only way forward for a long time. Ludwig would articulate their cause; but he would not be the one to lead it.

"There is no other way about it. If we are to survive, to protect us from the corruption and the oppression of the Muggles, we must do what is right and necessary. We must summon the practitioners of the Dark Arts!"

Wilhelm slunk backwards. The more distance he built from this now, the better for him in the long future ahead of them. He knew at that moment that Ludwig, the Kohl brothers, Dieter and everyone else would be wasting away in some abominable place. After uttering those words, Ludwig had cursed them. Wilhelm did not normally believe in the power of words alone to curse. But in his ignorance, he felt an intuitive prang. The air around them had changed.

He darted his head over both shoulders. A door led to the rest of the house. Away from this kitchen where doom was being cooked over Ludwig's festering ego. How they had not found the only ingredient missing, a subordinating mind to put Ludwig in his happily inferior place, Wilhelm did not know.

Pack. He must pack, grab whatever he could and start running again. No sooner had they arrived than they had sealed another suicidal pact, worse than the plans conceived before involving runs to the Wall or runs over the Inner Border or any kind of escape. He knew that every further moment he remained here, he would become more implicated in their acts of surrender to whoever Ludwig and friends were to invite into their circle.

Rosa had always told him what and how to pack. She was absent now as Hoffer was. Were they thinking ahead of him as always? Perhaps he had just acquired the inspiration which they had earlier. Maybe Hoffer knew this was to transpire and packed to leave before the inevitable. That would be it. Should the escape fail, he knew Ludwig had his designs on the community.

But what of Rosa? Wilhelm knew any effort he made would be fruitless without her. But what of plans now? He saw every conception, every sketch and outline of ideas put down to parchment resulted in catastrophe and overthrow of the previous set of plans.

Wherever he stood now, Wilhelm knew that Hoffer would not be returning to his own home.


	5. Chapter 5

**The German Patient**

July 9th 1977

Burton Bloom Hospital

11.00 A.M.

_Where in Christ's name have they sent me now? First thing I wanted to know when I woke. Location, triangulation, extraction. But no, classified as they would have it. Bloody doctors not slipping a word straight or edgeways. Crucify them all as soon as I can get hold of a firearm and some carpentry tools. There must be someone carrying shooters in this Godawful place, they'd have to if they know it has me here._

_Where in the bastard hell am I? The North. The bloody North. Secretaries and corridor staff speaking in that guttural drawl of Glory Glory Leeds United. God save me, they've sent me back here to this wretched place. Bastards. Bastards. Motherless swine, all of them. Spend their lives calculating the ruination of other men's lives from behind their desks before getting Bentleys to take them away from the Headmaster's office in Whitehall to their gay apartments in Kensington where all the boys from the club can reminisce about the time they spanked Perkins to the bat during the Great Match._

_They'll let the brandy swill until they've tired and then go to plush linen beds. And they send me here._

_I talk up a good talk, one has to do so in the Rhineland and even worse in Berlin. Dealing with those poxy agents and their pyramids of lies. Inventing the most grotesque tales of derring-do about being thrown packages of intelligence on the autobahns. It's all nonsense but one has to ferret out the intelligence they bring like gold dust from river silt. You sit there and listen whilst they jabber on and try to transcribe as best one can without letting them catch wise, as the Yanks say, that you're steadily discrediting them with each memo to London._

_Lang was always pure Prussian pomposity wrapped in an overcoat and trilby. Even if he hadn't bilked half the time he was meant to show, later concocting some brave talk about a flight from the Stasi and the NVA, his intelligence was mostly irrelevant and contrived stuff that would have us barking like mad up every wrong tree in every forest west of Fulda if I wasn't so discriminatory with him. Occasionally he would let something slip that he thought was irrelevant. A new division moved here; so-and-so appointed commander of this airbase or that naval yard. Otherwise useless._

_Like these sunflowers. Who the hell puts sunflowers beside the bed cabinets in a loony bin? Of course this isn't a full-fledged one. They'd have been apt to lock me up in Broadmoor. Not without precedent and far within the limits of their power. No trial, no hearing, just stamp Jon Taylor as mad and get him somewhere out of the way, dodging affections and jealousies of every monster able to blag his way out of a life sentence and into secure treatment. _

_Not full-fledged, of course. This is for short-term stays, I think. Provincial. Families will take their children up here for visits to whomever has caused them curtain-shutting disgrace. Mother, father, aunts and uncles all here waiting for their little ones to be brought up on the weekends to see them. I'll bet the families turn it into some bloody day trip. It's probably the only outings those poor mites get after the diagnosis. _

_"We used to go to the seaside with Mummy and Daddy, now Daddy takes us to see Mummy in the big grey hospital where sunflowers are kept by her bedside and she gets to play ping-pong with perennial suicide-attempters and dishonored officers of the Defence Section."_

_For the love of God, why did they send me here?_

_Arse it, the shrink comes forth from his meetings. Play up, play up and play the game. Progress made, no more headaches, everything going smoothly. Not too smoothly, can't rush things as these or he'll be onto me like the best of the Moscow Centre._

_I miss Crosby. Having him by one's side is never dull, one always feels safe._

_In walks this gangly chap with ill-fitting long hair and a brown untailored jacket that suits him just as well. He looks too senior to be pally with the young post-beatniks who staff this institution, determined to treat everyone here with the kindness and Beatleonian compassion that dangerous malcontents referred here by the courts deserve. _

_Is he in some grotesque disguise? Aren't we all. He pulls out his clipboard and leaves me sitting here on this absurd sofa whilst he click-clucks away with the normal niceties._

"How are you feeling today, Jonathan?"

"Taylor. Your insistence on informality won't get you anywhere, you know. And feel free to chalk that down as 'resistant to treatment', get me falsely imprisoned here for another six months."

"You're not imprisoned here, Jonathan, you know that as much as I do. You're free to leave whenever you like, discharge papers are available from Reception."

"Don't fob me off with sincerity, doctor, it insults me. Must I say again what will happen to me if I leave this place and walk more than a few hundred meters down the road?"

"Yes, yes of course, your... your employers, you said in the session before last. You said they had placed you on indefinite leave but were still retaining you?"

"Once I get out of here, I'm going for a hearing, it's the least I bloody well deserve from those old Checkists after what I've done for them."

"And done too them, they might retort."

"Do you even know why they sent me to you? It's never been brought up, I assumed you knew some sketchy details of a pack of lies they must have sent over in a basket with some '63 Bollinger for you and the chief executive of this poxy place to keep quiet."

"On the contrary Jonathan, your employers sent me a full report, have it right... right here in my files. Hadn't brought it up so far as you'd not indicated you were ready. If you'd like to review what happened on that night, we can proceed with that now if you like."

"Well how long have we got left?"

"About forty-five minutes."

_I remain inert. A grey wall clock ticks by in the corner. _

"You were employed with British Standard Chemical as a sales negotiator for partners in continental Europe. You had worked at the company's West German office in Bonn for two years and had a good work record. On April 30th of this year at about eleven o'clock in the evening, you were waiting to meet potential trade clients with your colleague Mr. Anthony Crosby in the French Sector of West Berlin. You were sat on the veranda of a bar that was popular with American servicemen called Satchmo's Bistro. Whilst waiting for the clients to arrive, you had become steadily intoxicated and grew impatient with the clients' delayed arrival."

_Clients. Clients who were perpetually late, never paid in full and would bore one with unfathomed leagues of tall tales whilst debriefing over stale coffee. _

"At around eleven-thirty, your temper grew rapidly out of control, at which point you seized a firearm from an on-duty American soldier standing a few metres from your table, pointed it towards the Soviet Sector of East Berlin and began firing."

_Bastards. Bastards attempting to flee and making a public show of it. It's their damned Statute, not mine._

Taylor reconstructed every second of the night. He obstructed the intrusion of the new edition being propagated by the shrink and whoever had written the script for him.

"You were then dragged from the bar by a group of patrons and then by police officers, shouting audibly but incoherently about magic, wizards and wizardry."

He realised that even on the night he had begun clearing that part from his mind.

"Would you like me to continue or would you prefer to stop there?"

The doctor was born too early for the Sixties but had obviously made more than an elementary effort to catch up with them. The afterlife of this attempt was to be found not only in his hair and distasteful spectacles but the decor which he kept the room in thrall to. There was the ghostly presence of a Rolling Stones poster. Taylor knew there could not be one there, yet the room seemed to be missing it like an Edwardian school dormitory without its copies of Boys' Own.

"Thank you, doctor. That is suitably refreshing."

He was wise. Taylor could sniff out the wise. Sometimes it was literally the stench of the right drink. He knew what was kept in the Security Mob's cellars.

"Tell me, doctor, I have a query you might be able to help with. Pertaining to the circumstances of my condition."

"I'll answer to the best of my faculties."

"And none of this hippie nonsense which may I add is beneath a man of your learning and profession."

"Please, converse with me, brother Jonathan."

_What to tempt him with. What to lead him in. Some invitation to share the consensus, if there be one._

_"The Match at Lord's. In 1914 it was called off. The Other Place was very disappointed. Why did they call it off again?"_

_The doctor looks up from his clipboard and for the first time, right through his glib spectacles into me as a confidante._

_"The match was cancelled due to rain."_

_A few perfunctory seconds goes by. But forget this needless foreplay._

_"You still in the Service?"_

_"Believe it or not I'm retired." The doctor replies, burying face again in the clipboard and flicking through the notes sent to him by whoever was keeping Taylor here._

_"Why. Tell me why. D'they force you out? What was it, some minor scandal they were willing to forgive to bring you in on this little catastrophe?"_

_"No. I wanted to go into civil practice, get away from treating cases like yours, men they brought in from the cold for a few months in a year before sending them out into the worst of it again. And civilians, ordinary folk, they deserve what Service training can offer. It would help if more of us went into this line of work, I think, give something back the people that feeds us. In Hampshire, for instance, I have a friend from a standard medicine background currently having terrible problems treating this boy, has an incurable fascination with-"_

_"Should I tell them that's what you think?" I ask._

_"Think of what?"_

_"That you don't agree with sending us back out into the cold after the rituals of treatment and rehabilitation."_

_"That isn't what I think, it's a partly accurate approximation of what I said."_

_"They won't make much distinction between what you've said and what you may think."_

_"How long have you known these people again?"_

_"Who, the wizards or the Service?"_

_I let out a slight guttural chuckle. It's enough to get a pendulum equal response from him. Not sure if I should push for the jugular question yet. Whether he's one of them, or knows them at the very least._

_"The Service. I assumed the wizarding element of your breakdown was either being scripted or represents some substitutional childhood fantasy. Either you were making a very bizarre show of it for the press or in the moment of cracking you recalled something that comforted you in your boyhood that involved wizards."_

_"Do you think they're scripting this?"_

_"What? So they can throw you out like a loony, expose and ruin you publicly so the communists will help you get your legs over the Wall? Christ, their penetration tactics haven't changed since the Cuban crisis. And what are the chances of you ever getting home?"_

_He is suitably dispirited with the whole of London Centre to have been removed from the pension rolls long ago. Maybe just an act. There are men like this in every corner of England, plenty up north and down west as well. Schoolmasters mostly, then police inspectors, doctors, petty local officials, a few clergymen though not as many as there were. Out of the Service for whatever reason but helped into provincial life with some crumpled dignity left. _

_"Home." I say, playing something of the old soldier, "Home isn't something I have thought of for a while. Bonn was my home. The continent was my home, whatever grubby little town I ended up in picking up crumbs after the Soviet trade delegations or debriefing some weaseling little snitch from the Bloc who decided a British government pension suited him better."_

_"You haven't answered my question." He remarks. Sharper tack than I expected._

_"No," I say, "I don't think they'd let me home afterwards. They know where I come from, know better than any man, they'd never let me back where I might find some peace. And you haven't answered mine either."_

_"Which one was that?"_

_"Do you think they're scripting this whole thing?"_

_He pauses for the right response, something correct._

_"No. Though they have written the end. You're out of the Service, consider yourself lucky if they move you to a mail-fiddling room in Gloucestershire after what you did."_

_"And what did I do, doctor? Shouted and hollered about wizards and witchcraft, childish things whilst surrounded by those American apes and having not eaten a decent meal for twenty hours waiting for that trumpet-blasting fool Lang to show up at the checkpoint!"_

_"Not forgetting that you fired several shots into East Berlin, had the entire border on alert, the East Germans were mobilizing for a counter-attack before Washington persuaded them it was a terrible misunderstanding. They had to write this off as an attempted provocation by a deranged man, which all the evidence supports it to have been."_

_"And what if I was not deranged, have you considered that? What if there was some truth in what I was blabbering whilst the Germans were dragging me down those stairs? Do you not think it even ontologically conceivable that forces might exist outside of the damned Red-Blue spectrum? Some persecuted religion, some heretical sect, some group of people we've ignored and swept under the Curtain because it makes the equations too complicated on the blackboard?"_

_Doctor appears perturbed. I tilt my head back ceiling-wards and recompose._

_"They've read my reports. It's all in there. The Communists have made too many enemies of themselves at home, blown up too many churches to make way for car parks, sent too many priests to Siberia. The Orthodox Christians, ah, now they'll get their deliverance and they won't be forgiving. But what about the others? Has Control thought about that from behind his plum desk and brandy-case? What about all the little weirdoes, the sects who over here get record deals and Aunty Beeb puts on Top of the Pops but over there get their worship meetings broken-up by the KGB? What do you think it'll have done to them? Don't you think it'll ferment one day, like spirits sloshed around a great steel vat without preservatives?"_

_He clearly isn't buying the product I have fashioned for so long and with such great sincerity. I'll finish it off, this little prototype of the defence I'll put to the hearing, before retiring to a position of calmness and corrected temper._

_"It's old religion, doctor, the true old religion. Thought we'd stamped it out here with the Druids under Julius Caesar or with Cromwell and the Witchfinder-General, you'd be wrong. All over this land, all over Europe, little communities following practices more ancient and tested than anything Marx had to reckon with in his plan for the truly opiate-free society. They don't like it when you upset their milk-jugs and they especially don't like you restricting their movements. That's why I fired at the Wall, doctor, because I could see one of their little escape parties on the move. And they don't understand, doctor, they just don't appreciate or have any truck for our ways of doing things, much less the Communists. All it takes is a few of them trying to scarper over the German Inner Border, God forbid the Wall itself, muttering their little incantations along the way and we've got an entire operation buggered."_

_He's noting this down. Small victory for the Jon Taylor defence counsel. He might pass this to whoever's briefing him. If he is part of the Security Mob, a long-gone SIS man sent out into the wilderness and reactivated for domestic tosh, it might play well. Butter them up. Walk into a job with the bastards tomorrow. He opens his thin lips again._

_"But you did bugger the operation, you lost your agent and you caused an international incident, that's hardly a job well done."_

_"Yes well just imagine how much worse it could have been? What if some of them had got over? The bloody Yanks would have taken it on themselves to help the others, give them covering fire, you know what a man's like fresh in fatigues given a posting right on the frontline. Try and picture how ugly that would have been. Some pitiful little sect fleeing persecution tries to make it to liberty in the West only to be mowed down by the East Germans. Or worse, the Yanks intervene to bring them over and within a few seconds we've got tank battles at every checkpoint in Berlin. The Service can do what it bloody well likes, I carried the cross and bore the sins of man for them. Instead of another Battle of Berlin and World War Three starting over some poxy magicians, they get to blame a bit of minor confusion at Checkpoint Delta on one drunken, demented operations man now sent out to pasture in God's Own Country. That's where we are, isn't it? Yorkshire?"_

_He seems to be swallowing it. I am on the levels far above him, astride some catwalk of awareness that he is not privy to now nor then. He is beginning to allow himself to realise that this entire mess is but a beautiful mosaic organised by Control from the beginning. A few shots fired errantly but well-placed over that grey monstrosity are enough to defuse simmering tensions with the Russians and give them a sacrificial lamb. London is willing to punish its own as harshly as anyone for upsetting the balance. _

_He could go any way with this. I am, I must admit, holding my breath._

_"Yes. Yes we are. The West Riding."_


	6. Chapter 6

**File Ref - T. Snape**

October 20th 1977

Cokeworth, West Yorkshire, England

09.30 GMT

Emsley drummed his loose hand on the dashboard. Everything was in focus, or rather focus was everything, yet his distractedness that gave Mr. Appleton cause to cozen him with the measuring-stick, and Miss Watts to give him a clipped ear during Biology and the Headmaster to give his parents a stern warning that "the boy will never rank higher than an underling if he fails to improve his focus", afflicted him still.

It was a wonder he had made it to plainclothes. He awoke each morning with residual shock from the sudden announcement in July by DCI Tucker. Moreover, he was to be getting a uniformed partner on certain calls. Usually delivering news of some character so awful that it was deemed necessary for someone in CID to make the call. Bobbies would deliver the road accidents and piano-crushings; he would deliver the murders.

"Most of the time, if it's a bloke been knocked off by persons unknown, his family'll be welcoming to coppers as flies to swatters." Tucker's assessment seemed prejudicial to Emsley at first; but as the months ticked by, delivering notifications of kicked-to-death and beaten-with-bricks to the aproned wives and mothers of cold slabs with a long list of previous, he began to question where he'd got his saucer-ducking abilities from.

Now he had a few bruises and a suitably worn coat to fill the part. He'd even got the right sort of car, though it didn't quite agree with him. He missed being able to use the beat car, but after the business over the riding he knew more than one of the wodentops who were shying away from going out in them alone. Now the Provos were going to turn God's Own Country into West Belfast, going out in uniform in the pandas should be getting everyone danger pay.

So pertinent, he thought, his new woodentop follow-on was a Paddy himself.

"Not that sort, and he'd probably knock flat any many who said he was. Ulsterman, son of the Order, first words as a babba were probably 'King Billy' and learned how ta' march in the Orange band before he could walk." DCI Tucker has warned Emsley when the new partnership was disclosed to him some two weeks earlier.

Perhaps they could better use the new boy over in Harrogate and Scarborough. Local knowledge of his Ulster brethren might be put to better use there. Still, a partner was a partner and Emsley would suppress his teeth-grinding scorn to be dealing with a green lad fresh out of Hendon and shunted up north where he didn't know Derwent from Derby.

He pondered this while the lad sat next to him, leafing through the local A-Z. He was fresh in the neatly-buttoned tunic and unscuffed, uncrumpled cap that was yet to come into contact with a single Leeds fan's ham fist or boots. How boorish his inductions would have to be. Yet he was being thrown in somewhere near the deep end. Did they have swimming baths in Belfast? Probably all pissed in the water every P.E. lesson to spite the schools from the other side of town.

They were on a murder inquiry. DCS Hobson had put Tucker onto chasing up loose leads for the Prostitute Murder Squad. It was a frustrating expenditure of the team's time; Tucker had remained insistent that Huddersfield had more pressing cases than adding to the bewildering number of evidence folders amassing in Leeds for one bloke with a hammer. He was a bastard, there was no disputing it - but murders happened every month, in every town, not all of them big and exciting. Alkie husband batters his wife with a spade then scarpers over the Moors, and someone had to go looking for him. Two drunks knock some poor lad over in a car and vanish into the night. Now this evil business over the Riding, two coppers murdered and nobody in the cells.

Soon, Emsley hoped, he and the Stone lad would be on the chase for someone they could call their own collar. Red meat. Today it was just birdseed. Roughhouse dad of a local weirdo who was being sought for questioning. Might be involved with the prostitute murders, might not. Tucker was more interested in getting another young one with black shoulder-length hair that said "trouble" brought in and searched. With Hobson and the Leeds CID's prerogative to go hunting for the prostitute killer, Tucker dispatched them to the address of the young man's father.

"Looks like the sort who'd do summat worth nicking him for regardless, if it isn't OAPA, it'll be speed or worse like. Get the dad first, the boy's never around the house or the district so find out where his haunts are and get onto him from there."

Stone had been fascinated with the scenery for some while as Emsley had driven them through the fading mill-town. The strikes had only piled straw on a long-stricken camel that lost its viability for steelmaking as soon as the Arabs had turned off the oil taps. Emsley imagined that Stone was from some hard-nosed Protestant dairy farm out in the cow-shite sticks of County Antrim and may not have seen a mill before. He knew though that the lad would have had run-ins with his share of hard nuts from both sides of the barricades and should be stomach enough for dealing with a local flat-cap who had long been referred to as 'former' in his old profession.

"Don't forget, I'll lead, you follow-up with questions 'bout that thing over the Riding. Don't let him lead you round the merry-go-round. This sort'll say anything to send you off in the wrong direction so watch out."

His tutelage of Stone would continue for some time, but for now they exited the car they had parked near a cobbled alleyway and low pavement kerb. Emsley half-expected some townie kids to turn up and try to scarper with the wipers or mirrors but was confident that his recently-acquired motor would be suitably in shot from the living-room he hoped their host would not have made intolerable.

They approached a wooden black door against a late-Victorian terrace. He wondered if this would ever have any value in it for letting. It was certainly, despite its discoloured exterior and the shadow cast by the mills down the century, a damn sight lot more picturesque than the stuff they were shoveling the national finances into building in the big towns. Knocking down the old slums in Sheffield over the last twenty years to make way for giant cinder blocks that made the area an even more unsightly monstrosity than the Industrial Revolution had scarred it. A child's doll-house made out of concrete.

The old Romantic buried deep in Emsley's constitution would shine through now and then. Especially when he was made to walk under grotesque, subserviced street lights, spat-out gum and graffiti on every flat surface. The town looked worse than the other mill-towns. Worse than other Labour strongholds. He'd seen the Valleys. That bloody girl from Newport had made sure of that. Yorkshire folk would be grateful for their poverty after seeing the Valleys.

This place was worse, by a good hundred miles. The town centre, the blackened backstreets, the rows and rows of terraces. The new cinder-blocks going up near the edges. Town planning done in smoke-filled committee rooms with planners, councilors, land-holders swilling the scotch and divvying up the envelopes. Socialist realism meets the modern market economy.

He loathed one particular estate they had passed before reaching Spinner's End. looked like something from behind the Curtain. The new developments were probably taken off blueprints dreamed up by some bureaucrat who liked to number the workers' towns he drew up for the Central Committee from his dacha. This one would be called Mill Town #45.

"This poxy little town was big for coke-stacks back before the war - the first one - but it's had nowt going for it since then." Emsley reminded Stone as he ratted on the drab knocker of the front door.

Stone was unaccustomed to local snobbery between the mill-towns, pit villages and incorporated cities. What he knew were the terraces chanting "up the IRA" and "up the UDA" - and that was in Salford. Ninety-nine of every hundred days he had lived were on the mainland but home always caught up with him like the plague.

His first proper case with the CID boys, now was not the time to be weighted by patriarchal memories of the walled city and the bogs. Think of something fast. Get matey, not too matey, but good matey with Emsley.

"That's a nice motor, when'd'ya get it?"

Emsley glanced over at the Granada and turned back to the door, half-glancing over at Stone.

"Bout six months ago, got it off a DCI in Salford. Here, look sharp."

Stone felt the urge to suddenly adjust one of his buttons as the door creaked open. He fixed eyes with the figure behind and immediately wished otherwise.

Rheumy iris would explain little of the shriveled and yet bloated hulk that slouched before them. It stood in a stoop that managed to obstruct the mild sunlight from without and leave the hallway behind it in darkness. Stone butted with the first query.

"Mr. Snape?"

"Aye."

The stench had followed the figure as he had opened the door, but his breath made the Bell's scotch all the more readily available to those awaiting entry to the house.

"Mr. Tobias Snape?" Emsley followed up.

"Aye."

"I'm Detective Inspector Mike Emsley, this is PC Stone, West Yorkshire Police. If you don't mind, Mr. Snape, we'd like to speak to you for a few minutes, we have some questions we'd like to ask regarding your son."

This time, the hulking scotch-cloth did not even muster a response. They stood before the door awaiting his reply.

"Have you seen your son recently, Mr. Snape?" Stone asked, causing the man's eyes to tilt towards him and downwards.

"No. A'nt seen him."

"When was the last time you saw your son, Mr. Snape?" Stone continued.

"... few year ago. Lives wi' his mam now."

"And where does his mother live now?" Emsley asked, noting down the few utterances they were receiving.

"Don't know."

The astonishing co-operation notwithstanding, the officers thought it their prerogative to gain entry to the house. Emsley led the charge, Stone taking his own notes.

"Would we be able to have a word inside, Mr. Snape? It really is quite important speak to your son soon sooner rather than later if we could."

Mr. T. Snape grunted and shifted his stare back to Emsley.

"Ah've told you. Don't know where he is, an't seen him since he went off to live wi'his mam."

They remained fixed to the front doorstep. Emsley thought it time to play up some severity in the matter.

"Mr. Stone, I'm sure you're aware of the enquiries we've been making in the local area. Your son is someone we are seeking in relation to those enquiries. If someone else gets to question him first, they'll want to know why you weren't willing to tell us where he was. We understand you've separated but it's important we know where he is, for his sake, his mother's sake, and your own sake."

Snape's eyes darted from the detective to his counterpart. They seemed to crane around into the house as he turned on his heels, leading them in.

The living room was more disheveled than its sole occupant. Several stacks of local newspapers and racing sheets from before the subscription was terminated. Years of stains and a musk of stale beer hung between the yellowed walls. Emsley feared the carpet, realised he was becoming too proud and trod upon it as it were pavement. There was certainly sufficient discarded chip paper for it to pass. He sensed that a dog or dogs must have lived here yet knew of no reason to suspect there had been.

The ardor had long departed from whatever marriage produced a lone photograph on the mantelpiece of a couple wearing best, taken at some point in an age when the curtains were kept open and the settee was free of empty bottles and papers.

He only now noticed that Snape had been wearing a flat-cap. It was difficult to mark the points between the bristles of aged black hair and the tweed of the hat. Both appeared to have flecks of blood across the surface. Perhaps it was tomato sauce. No, definitely blood. This Snape looked like he had gone without a decent meal of food for a week or so, earmarking his shrapnel for fresh rum, which Stone thought had begun to cover the scotch in the air.

"Do you follow the football, Mr. Snape?" Stone tried with his petty icebreaker to cut the tension. He pondered if Snape was even aware of the cold in the conversation, or in the apparently unheated room.

"Used'te. Played the asides when I were a lad. Don't follow it no more."

"Madness about Nottingham Forest, Clough's really proving himself again, no?" Stone continued, Emsley glancing at him to indicate advice in the ill.

Snape continued to stare with half-vacancy at both of them. Emsley started on topic again.

"Mr. Snape, as you're probably aware, several women have been murdered in the West Riding of Yorkshire and in Greater Manchester over the past two years. We're currently investigating these killings and the possibility they may be linked. Do you know what I'm referring to? Have you heard or seen anything about these murders, Mr. Snape?"

Snape seemed to chew the inside of his lip, in want of tobacco or some minor distraction. When he spoke, he had a gargling, almost Francophone guttural clutch in his voice.

"Heard about it. On'radio. Seen about it. On'television."

He nodded towards an older, mid-Sixties television set in the corner. Stone wondered if it had been ripped off from a rental shop but that concerned them not for now.

"Well as you'll know then, Mr. Snape, it's very important we follow up all possible leads. Have you ever been to Manchester, Mr. Snape?" Stone asked, Snape raising half an eyebrow at his Ulster tones before resettling his focus on Emsley.

"Used to go down there. During' war. Went wi'me mam and dad. Went t'pictures to see Humphrey Bogart. Haven't been back since."

"Has your son ever been to Manchester, Mr. Snape?" Emsley asked.

"Don't know. Don't know where that lad goes."

"Your son's last known abode on our records was at this address, do you know why this was, Mr. Snape? Can you think of any reason why your wife wouldn't want to update her address with the council or the tax office?" Emsley continued, drawing out a file from his pocket which contained a summary sheet on the Snapes.

"Don't know." Snape looked away from the officers as he grunted again.

They were getting progress equaling that of a mule on a disagreeable Monday morning. Emsley upped the ante.

"Mr. Snape, you should appreciate this is a matter of great urgency. Your son is being sought in connection with a murder enquiry, he's not a suspect yet but he is a person of interest. They've got three forces looking for people who've got anything to do with this. If you're withholding information from us, it'll look very bad when we do bring him in."

Snape seemed unfazed. He motioned his gums as if chewing his tobacco and seemed ever indifferent to the officers. Appeals to the welfare of his offspring affected little.

"Do you care much for your son, Mr. Snape?"

"Care?" Snape barely raised his intonation in the query.

"Bright young lad, isn't he? Says here he got a scholarship to a school up in Scotland. Takes after his mam, does he? But he looks like a right chip off the old block."

Emsley glanced down at the document in his hand. A Xerox copy of the younger Snape's contacts with the police included arrest photographs.

WEST YORKSHIRE POLICE. 14/02/1974. SNAPE, SEV.

At fourteen he had been pulled in by Leeds for an alleged affray. The witnesses had recanted their claims before he could appear at the Magistrates Court and was let off. Other times he'd been questioned, prodded, pulled into various stations when weird stuff happened. Neighbours' pets went missing then would reappear in the next town. A group of school-leavers who hung around the local bus shelters hard-nutting available victims wound up in the district infirmary with scalding purple burns on their face. The nurses thought they might have got radiation poisoning, but had no clue how.

The last photograph, the one Emsley had studied intently before driving himself and Stone to Spinner's End, was taken the previous year. At sixteen, the younger Snape had, according to another crop of witness statements later retracted, followed his father to a tavern before threatening him with an unidentified weapon. Police had been called to the house and found Eileen Snape in a state of distress, having sustained a number of injuries. Tobias Snape was to be prosecuted under the new Domestic Violence Act but Eileen and the boy had both disappeared as soon as the prosecution of the younger Snape was dropped.

It was remarkable how quickly the threats to his liberty seemed to drop. Emsley wondered if the lad was studying legal theory in his spare time, developing a cultivated practice of witness intimidation and the apologetics needed to persuade all the right people of the pointlessness of pursuing a case.

He knew all of this in advance of the perfunctory questions to Tobias Snape on the whereabouts of the estranged, battered spouse and the son whom DCI Tucker had more than once referred to as "another local weirdo who wants bringing in." They were testing the limits of how far the desolate man would lie to them and gauge whether any loyalty still remained to his only sprog. Apparently, despite their history, he seemed intent on remaining tight-lipped.

"'Spose he is."

The faint physical resemblance between the sunken figure in the filthy chair opposite them and the photographs was apparent but thin. Even in the inopportune photographs taken in custody areas, there glared back a youthful charm buried under a veneer of the cold. Emsley had seen them at school, there was precedent to the younger Snape's sort. Devilish entrapment of every mother's daughter just with a slightly haunted glance. The DCI was wrong to tag him as just another one of the sort that every copper in the region was pulling aside to ask about the murders.

There was method in his isolation. The boy would have kept his distance from most others out of knowledge of what he could do, but Emsley doubted he would act on it. Bouts of anger and temper going off the handle when this sulking, shrinking beast of a father provoked him. But most of the time, he could imagine this boy sitting in an alcove or a stairway writing poetry, sketching lilies or dreaming of running off to join a band.

He wasn't out murdering prozzies. But speaking to this kid would shed some light on things left in the dark.

"Are you aware of what happened over in Darlington earlier this year, sir?" Emsley led again.

"No."

"Back in April, two of our colleagues from the North Riding, Sgt. Andy Fisher and PC Mark Anderson were found shot dead in their car just outside Darlington town centre. They'd been following a motorcycle that started off in Northallerton. A young man closely fitting your son's description was seen in the area around the time of the bike's appearance in the town. Sev - it is Sev, right, we think the records might be incomplete - is being sought by officers in North Yorkshire for questioning as a potential witness."

Snape's eyes appeared to fill with some life. Suddenly, he was more aware of things.

"Of course, we're not handling that investigation, our priority is the murders of the young women." Emsley faced Stone, "North Yorks are still going ballistic about that one."

Stone went from his script, delivering like a Gielgud.

"Oh yeah, Alistair says they're arresting everyone and his granny who doesn't co-operate. Barely any witnesses so they're dragging in anybody with the most tenuous links to it."

"You wouldn't know if Sev has ever been over the Riding, has he, Mr. Snape?" Emsley had turned to face Tobias once again, his ruddy face now becoming slightly reddened and particles of sweat beginning to appear beneath his scalp and glands.

"Only it would help us and our colleagues eliminate him nice and quickly, eliminate him from the investigation that is, if you knew where he's been for the past year or so." Stone continued.

Snape's jaw, withered by the years yet stationary in place until that point, had begun to quiver slightly. It was enough. Above the stench of the drink and the fags, Emsley could smell the rat as if it had been dead for a week.

"Mr. Snape. Tell us where your son is. Tell us where he is so we don't have to bring you to the station and turn this place upside down, go through all his sock drawers and old school reports."

He seemed to choke, then laugh.

"Gheh, ye wouldn't believe yersel'if ye did."

"Is Sev with his mother, did he go with her when she left?" Stone asked.

"Either wi'her or back to that school. You won't believe me if I tell you where it is or what it is so just look for her. Didn't tell me where they'wis going, just heard things."

"Things?"

Emsley kept his eyes locked with Snape's bloodshot pair, as did Stone. Their host was beginning to feel trapped in his living room.

"Ripon. Harrogate. Towns, towns over the Riding. She were running off somewhere, tekkin', 'boy wi'her. Ah can't say no more."

Emsley leaned towards him, Stone furiously scratching into the notebook.

"But you can say more, Mr. Snape. You will do if you don't want to be sharing a cell with the lad."

Emsley could tell when a father feared his son. Years ago he might have succeeded in clipping or seeing to the lad with something blunt, now he recoiled from the thought of it. He grunted more heavily and took a deeper breath.

"He came back. One night this year. About April. Came back for his things. Took one look at me, I went upstairs till he was done. Won't like before. He's evil. He's got evil in them eyes."

"Do you think your son killed those police officers?" Stone asked him bluntly.

"Might've. Don't know."

"Do you think your son has anything to do with the murders of those women?" Emsley persisted.

"Don't know."

Emsley snapped back.

"Mr. Snape we can secure a warrant to search these premises and you can be charged as an accomplice if the lad has done something and you're covering for him!"

"Covering for him?" Snape was incredulous, "I wouldn't cover a door for that lad. He means nowt' to me. And his name isn't Sev, it's Severus. Another wretched idea of his mam's. Never seen eye to eye we never, always brooding away somewhere, scheming, plotting, never respected his father. I just don't want him back, want nowt' to do wi'him. Ye go off looking for him, you won't come back from it."

Stone looked back up from his notebook. Emsley was silent for a moment.

"What do you mean?"

Snape began to shiver, as if a blast of wind had struck him.

"Things happen around that lad. Happened. They did, while he were still here. You know all this, your lot were here every five minutes asking bloody questions about it. I don't think he killed those women. D'you know why? Cause you found 'em. If it were him, you wouldn't have found 'em. He'd just mek'em disappear. Same with those coppers. Just where it was that got me troubled like. That's where he'll be if you want him. Just don't be surprised if your search dogs start going mad or your cars get turned upside-down. Or you wake up nailed to a tree in Ireland."

Stone stood to his own defence.

"With respect, Mr. Snape, I'm not Irish."

"I don't bastard care where you're bastard from, lad, ye've not got a chance. Go home, see yer kids right, knock some discipline into 'em while they're young, mek'sure yer wife don't teach 'em any nonsense about... about anything."

There was a terse moment as Emsley couched then glanced through the files. He fixed eyes with Tobias a final time.

"Thank you for your help, Mr. Snape."

Tobias shrunk into the chair completely. His clammed skin had become colder and whiter, blotches and pimples now magnified under sweat.

"We'll see ourselves out if you don't mind."

Exiting the abode brought gasps of relief from both, now able to breathe an air unpolluted by eons of tar and spilt ales, mediated only by the exhales of the smokestacks and cooling towers in the near distance.

"D'you think it's him?" Stone asked as Emsley reached into his jacket and lit a cigarette a few paces from the front door, now free of the potential entanglement of sharing his packet with the shuffling bar mat they had just quizzed.

"Who, the dad or the lad?"

"The laddie, seems like it's a lot worse than just him being the local weirdo."

Emsley unlocked the car, ignoring some of the radio chatter to permit himself a moment's thought.

"The Snape lad couldn't have killed the prozzies. The lad's not the right fit. First killing were two year ago, so he'd have been fifteen. No way he'd have got onto it then and succeeded."

They both sat and Emsley started up, wanting to get his new Cortina far from Cokeworth in the fastest available time.

"He disappears for long lengths of time, supposedly at school in Scotland, neighbours report a violent and unsettled family, kid's got problems with his mammy and daddy and probably a grudge against women and girls - how does he not fit exactly?" Stone replied, trying to reach for a cigarette before Emsley stuffed it back into his jacket.

"Needs to be a big bloke, working man with a vehicle and local knowledge. No record of the Snape boy ever passing the driving test, let alone owning a motor. He's gangly, skinny, probably years of not being fed right, less upper body strength than the club secretary. Same thing for the coppers in Darlington. Wasn't him, I'll put the Christmas money on it." Emsley munched his words through the cigarette as the engine revved.

_"XW, XW to Charlie Five, are you receiving, over?"_

Stone answered, speaking with Emsley as he awaited the reply.

"Charlie Five receiving, over. So what's all this about? Why did we spend a serviceable half hour talking to that old drunk if his lad isn't the one?"

"He isn't, but he'll know something, summat going on in his little world that could lead us there. Scared runaway local weirdo gets to hear things. This one in particular, too many coincidences for him to just be wrong place wrong time sort. Most of it'll be bollocks but I'll take my winnings from betting the Christmas money and bet it that he'll give us something. If not this - well, summat else worth our time. Leeds wants us to cover their arses while the Prostitute Murder Squad goes rifling through every pervert's trousers from here to Bolton, fine. Just let us get on with catching some more dangerous sods while you're going after Jack the Ripper. And the Snape lad can lead us to them."

_"XW alert to Charlie Three and Four, suspected IRA member sighted in the vicinity of Brackenhall driving black Triumph motorcycle, Charlie units currently searching between Mirfield and KIrkheaton, units to assist over."_

"All received XW, we're on way from Cokeworth now, can we get suspect description, Charlie Five over." Stone replied as Emsley pulled the car into a turn and out of Spinner's End.

_"XW to Charlie Five, suspect's name is Sirius Black, wanted for questioning. Suspect believed armed."_

"See what I mean, lad?" Emsley said, switching on the yelper siren, "Dangerous sods to be led to."


End file.
